How is it that a controversy about politics becomes a
conversation about philosophy? From Hobbes to Harrington to
Shaftesbury to Berkeley, Timothy Dykstal explores the public
function of the philosophical dialogue at the beginning of
England's long eighteenth century. From his close analysis of the
works of the era's great philosophers, Dykstal argues that the
dialogue as a literary form helped to develop, and subsequently
transform, the public sphere in late seventeenth- and early
eighteenth-century England.
At the beginning of the period, the dialogue gained popularity
by representing an answer to the controversies that beset the
commonwealth. By the early eighteenth century, however,
philosophers were setting their dialogues against the practical
world of political mediation and defining a speculative realm that
was increasingly private and apolitical. It is in this sense that
what was originally a controversy about politics among many
dialogue writers--a controversy in search of answers to the
questions that plagued civil society--became a "conversation" among
a few philosophers that sought to be civil by asking more
questions.
By describing a period in history when the dialogue was both
philosophically speculative and politically engaged, Dykstal
revives an important genre in eighteenth-century literature and
restores it to its place in the public sphere, that discursive
realm in civil society where conflicts of interest are articulated
and negotiated.
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